Politics overshadows a conference to raise money for Ukraine

THE TITLE of the Ukraine Recovery Conference that opened on June 11th in Berlin may seem overly hopeful. For the moment there is still a lot more destruction than reconstruction going on in the country, and most of the attention is on providing resources to keep things from deteriorating any further. Russian drones and missiles have knocked out half of the 18 gigawatts of power-generating capacity that Ukraine had before last winter. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, speaking at the conference, pleaded for help in decentralising the country’s energy system (with generators, solar panels and wind turbines), and for more air-defence systems. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, obligingly announced he would give the Ukrainians a third Patriot missile battery.